The performance of aircraft mobile surfaces such as tails, horizontal tail planes, canards, elevators, spoilers, ailerons, flaps, other high lift devices (slats for example) or rudders, is one of the more important issues in global aircraft design.
Aircraft mobile surfaces are used as control surfaces, for example, ailerons are used to control roll, an horizontal tail plane is used to control pitch and a rudder is used to control yaw. Therefore its behaviour defines aircraft control laws and design constrains.
Aircraft mobile surfaces can be affected by other parts of an aircraft (for example they can suffer a loss of upstream dynamic pressure due to effects caused by a component located upstream of the flow) and one of the main problems in a design environment (and also in other fields) is to obtain an accurate position of a mobile surface that can be affected by other components of the aircraft in certain situations.
That position can not be obtained computing the surface as an isolated component, one needs to know the effect that other parts of the airplane (that can be upstream or downstream) have on the mobile surface. In fact, a difficult computation is to be expected when working with mobile surfaces that are strongly affected by the effect of upstream air (for example, a downwash or wakes) of other surfaces on them.
In the known prior art, the behaviour of mobile surfaces affected by other aircraft's components is not computed directly. One of the known techniques involves the computation of the performance of the mobile surface at different positions and the obtention of the position for the required performance by interpolation. Another known technique involves the computation of the behaviour of the mobile surface without the effect of other component and the use of experimental information or theoretical correlations for obtaining the behaviour of the mobile surface completely installed in the aircraft.
Although these known techniques can provide close estimations of the position of a mobile surface, the results obtained do not comply with the current quality requirements of aircraft design, due to, among other reasons, they neglect second order effects and non-lineal behaviour of the flow.
The present invention is intended to solve this drawback.